


Bower

by cher



Category: Eroica Yori Ai o Komete | From Eroica with Love
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-24
Updated: 2012-04-24
Packaged: 2017-11-04 06:06:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/390620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/pseuds/cher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What would it take?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bower

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted May 2001, in answer to Bagheera’s Spring Challenge. Something about cherry blossoms says angst or romance. Romance ain’t my thing.
> 
> Thanks to the altogether wonderful Kadorienne, for hand holding and beta.

It was quiet here. Klaus could appreciate quiet. It let one think.

Here amongst the ridiculous assortment of sweet-smelling blossoms, watched unobtrusively by Z, who’d insisted, Klaus should have felt edgy. At loose ends. He was calm. It shouldn’t have been a word applied to him, not ever. And yet. Here it was.

It all came to spring mornings spent standing here, hemmed on all sides by the pervasive growth of rose, cherry-blossom and more he had no name for. Dorian’s estate. It wouldn’t be any other way.

It was quiet here. Let him think.

The slow motion replay Klaus lived in now filled the silence for him. He could hear the gunfire anyway. An overmatched mission. Too many KGB agents this time. Being Iron Klaus, he still thought he could fight his way clear. Even with the added baggage of the thief, again. He growled at Dorian to stay where he was, and got a predicably flip reply in a voice shakier than usual, something ending in ‘darling’. Dorian hated guns.

Klaus thought no more of him as he went KGB-hunting.

He took down seven of them before the odds caught up with him. Cornered, some young hotheaded agent who didn’t know enough, was too high on combat rage, to think about taking Iron Klaus alive. No more bullets in his own gun, but if he timed it right there was still a chance he could save the mission. Klaus stared down the barrel of the gun, aimed point-blank at his head.

Got ready to take the other agent down. And then there was a silent blur in front of him, precisely as the muzzle flared and discharged.

Freeze-frame as trademark blond curls hit the ground. Klaus on his knees before he knew what had happened, and his eyes were marked with the image he was going to see for the rest of his life. Dorian had taken the bullet with Klaus’ name on it through his face. Blood and grey matter on Klaus’ hands, and Dorian was unquestionably dead.

He’ll never remember the carnage the followed, but he walked out of the mission the only man breathing.

His alphabet were careful of him in the weeks following. They watched him with concerned eyes when they thought he wasn’t looking. Tried without trying to put him back together. 

At the funeral, he could not accept the sympathetic looks Eroica’s team gave him. They should have hated him. They should have accused him. They only included him in their grief and quietly invited him to visit Dorian whenever he wished. Klaus recognised the same hollowness in Bonham’s eyes he felt inside himself.

Still, he came often. Stood here in the sunlight and the flowering jungle and just. Thought. Remembered, when he could think past the gunshots and Dorian’s ruined face.

Dorian had given his beauty for Klaus, and it somehow seemed incidental that he’d given his life as well. There was only one thing Klaus considered of equal value. He stood amoung the blossom and the rose for a long time.

Then he bent and placed his Sig gently amoung the thorns. He walked away for the last time, leaving the cold gleam behind him. It was fitting.

Z watched from his post across the garden, and mourned the death of two great men.


End file.
